The resistance is not over – Open letter after the #WorldAfrinDay

We, who are working here in Rojava as internationals, are part of the worldwide fight of the opressed against the reign of state, capital and pathriarchy.

– șehid Hêlîn Qercox

The #WorldAfrinDay has been a historical example of resistance and international solidarity. Thousands took to the streets and stood up against this war, giving their support to the resistance and values of this revolution. Solidarity came from more than 50 cities from all around the world, and it proved how important what is happening here is for people. New groups and new people are organizing their solidarity, getting involved and defend the revolution. From Canada to Australia, from Mexico to Japan, the world has shown that Afrin is not alone.

For two months, the bombs of the Turkish army have been falling and killing people in Afrin. During these same two months, there have been worldwide actions against this occupation. And they will continue. Afrin, as the western canton of the Democratic Federation of Northern Syria, will be defended as the beacon of hope that it became, as the source of inspiration that it is. The bottom-up democracy, with women at the forefront building social ecology, is what the capitalist system tries to keep locked up, claiming that ‘there is no alternative’, that utopia is not possible. But here, we learned that another world is not only possible, but necessary, and it just depends on how much we believe in it, how determined we are to bring this utopia into existence.

Afrin is now under the occupation of the Turkish army. After these months of resistance, to see the occupation forces entering the city may seem like the utopia is going away once again; but no one said the revolution would come around easily. It was something we had only imagined before coming to Rojava, and witnessing with our own eyes what’s going on here. Today, here, we are taking on several centuries of the capitalist system and nation-state model. We are challenging thousands of years of patriarchal oppression and male rule power. We are challenging the essence of how society itself is perceived and organized.

But today we also need to examine ourselves and assess what we have done. As the internationalist commune, we did not manage to develop the full potential that international solidarity can mean for this revolution. We were not able to follow all the initiatives and actions that people shared with us, we were not able to give our perspectives and answers to all the ideas and proposals that were presented to us. We were not able to give the right answer to the attacks that struck us. We were not able to understand the real dimensions of the revolution that is going on here and the importance of defending what today is being developed.

But we will reflect on that, and we will learn from our mistakes. When the next attack of the ruling powers strikes once again, we will be wiser and more experienced, and more capable of defending ourselves and the people around us. We know that this can happen at any time, maybe tomorrow, and we know we can not do it alone. We need to be able to see the threats before they are too big to overcome. We need to have better and deeper analysis of the situation we are in. We need all the hope and the international solidarity that this revolution is raising in people’s hearts. And that’s why we call on you to come here.

But if you can’t come, there are still a thousand ways you can contribute to this resistance. We need to think how we can make this revolution successful, and what can be done in every place to achieve this aim. As internationalists, we need to be able to act and interact with the society we are in. We need to learn from the past movements and analyze what are the best ways to face oppression. From mass mobilization, to civil disobedience. From solidarity demonstrations, to direct actions. Yesterday, we showed the world that together we are strong. But the situation in Afrin today showed us that this is not enough. So now, we need to open a global debate about what should be the next step.

– This open letter is a call to all the people and groups who took an active role in the #WorldAfrinDay, and also to other initiatives in solidarity with the Afrin resistance. We want to open a public debate. We will be expecting your answers, your ideas, your proposals. We also call for your support to spread and translate this letter, you can find our email in ourwebsite.

Writing is getting more difficult. With everything happening so fast it is hard to stay alert and not inadvertently re-use one of the many propaganda phrases in circulation these days – words that make you start talking about something from the perspective of and full of the assumptions of the enemy classes. And then explaining why you write with weird phrases just makes pieces awkward to read.

So, what I have decided to do is make a new page on this blog, full of banned propaganda words and phrases. For the moment it is a small list, but I will be adding to it over time. Below is the first set of words and phrases that have been annoying me lately.

Immigration : – there is migration. Calling certain movements immigration only makes sense if (a) you assume the legitimacy of a defined territory into which people migrate, and (b) you are already there. Starting from the principle that decisions should be made by those most affected by them, any discussion of ‘immigration’ automatically excludes those people most affected – those who are not yet in some territory or other.

Post-coup crackdown (Turkey) :- I’m not denying there is a crackdown in Turkey at the moment. What I don’t like about the phrase is that it implies that all this is in response to the failed coup. When actually it is not. The move towards authoritarianism and the repression of democracy started long before the coup. If I was to give a date it would be the June 2015 elections when the AKP party lost its parliamentary majority – but I am open to correction and disagreement. Erdogan blatantly proclaimed that he was going to use the failed coup to his advantage and indeed the process of repression intensified since the coup. Calling it a post-coup crackdown allows him to play the over-reacting victim.

Trump’s victory/ Trump’s election, etc : Trump didn’t win, he got less votes than Hilary Clinton (and to put it in context, less than either of the republican candidates that ran against Obama). Calling it a victory legitimises him and the terror he is about to unleash. Calling it his election legitimises the anti-democratic system.

The worst news by far this month was how the anti-democratic system in the US decided to hand state power to a racist misogynist. There’s been many things written about that since the appointment (it’s not an election), so I’m just sharing three of them here: an article in Al Jazeera written by a Palestinian cultural heritage researcher, showing how a series of american presidents and politicians, including both Clintons, have on numerous occasions fucked over Palestine to boost their own profiles. I’m not sharing it in order to say that Trump isn’t that bad – just that in many places outside of the US he represents the continuation of arrogant figures who get to arbitrarily decide whether to intensify ongoing domination, colonialism, and general fucking-over of distant lands. But Trump is that bad, particularly for any people whose existence exposes the myth of white happy america. And that is exactly what the post sub-titled “Make it impossible for this system to govern on stolen land” does: naming a system that is united by the violence it serves to indigenous americans, people of african descent, people of demonised religions, non-white or english-speaking migrants, LGTQBI people, and the list could go on. And how to make it impossible for him/them/it to govern, that’s the reason why the other piece I’m sharing is a list of practical steps to practice solidarity and organise community self-defense in anticipation of a structural violence that looks set to accelerate, published on Cindy Milstein’s blog.

And much else from November follows a similar theme. It’s all about the rise of the fascist right and colonialism, or less pessimistically, anti-colonial resistance and self-defense. In what by now seems something from a different age, this article in ROAR just before Trump lost the election places the targeting of the HDP by Erdogan and subsequently by ISIS, as part of a longer pattern from the elections of 2015 and intensifying after the coup attempt earlier this year in which the country looks firmly on the road from republican democracy to fascist dictatorship.

And towards the end of the month we had the death of Fidel Castro. Regardless of where you stand on his politics, most people will agree that his death marks the passing of one of last and the most iconic figures of the cold war. Something from a different era, not just pre this current post-neoliberal fascist dystopia, but also pre-neoliberalism itself. The media was predictably formulaic talking about mourning in communist Havana and celebrations in dissident Florida. So the piece I picked was something on Al Jazeera that doesn’t try to balance the two views – he was a monster AND a socialist superman – but more importantly outside of the two cold war core spheres of influence, Cuba, Fidel and Che were known as anti-imperialist internationalists who helped the Vietnam liberation front, the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa, and participated in the Movement of the non-Aligned (although in the end they were shown up to be in the pockets of the Soviets..). (incidentally, for anybody who thinks this is too apologetic, ok, here a second link to a book review outlining the early roots of Che’s Stalinism).

Statement by by REPAK, the Kurdish Women’s Relation Office, followed by open letter from The Free Womens Congress, both written after Erdogan decree sees closure of 200 NGOs as part of the broader path of undoing democracy and establishing dictatorship. Both statement translated by Janet Biehl, translations originally appeared on Ecology or Catastrophe.

To the press and public,

Yesterday evening the Turkish ministry of interior decreed that 370 NGOs and associations in Turkey will be closed down. 199 of them are accused of being affiliated to the PKK, 153 to the Gulen movement, 18 to the DHKP-C front, and only 8 to Islamic State.

A short time after the announcement, the first associations were raided. The doors of the affected associations are even now still being sealed. All this is happening under the mantle of the emergency state and so-called “struggle against putschists,” so the associations have no legal way to respond to these unlawful, arbitrary, and antidemocratic attacks. They are being committed by the Turkish AKP government, which aims to totally gag the democratic public and especially the Kurds as the main force for democracy and freedom.

One of the 199 Kurdish associations closed by decree today is the Free Woman’s Congress (KJA), the largest umbrella organization of the Kurdish Women’s Liberation Movement in Turkey and Northern Kurdistan. Two weeks ago Ayla Akat Ata, its spokeswoman, had been detained while she was protesting the detention of Gultan Kisanak and Firat Anli, co-mayors of Diyarbakir, the largest Kurdish city.

Other associations that have been closed to date are the Selis Women’s Association, the Kurdish Writers Union, the Mesopotamian Culture Centre, the Mesopotamian Lawyers Association, the Libertarian Lawyers Association, the Peace Association, the Association to Fight Poverty Sarmasik (which provides monthly help for 5,000 families), the Free Journalist Union, the Seyr-i Mesel Theater Company, the Solidarity Association for Families of Prisoners, the Rojava Association, which was coordinating help for Rojava, and the Politics Academy of the Kurdish Party of Democratic Regions (DBP).

The closing of more or less all Kurdish registered legal associations follows the detention and arrest of 10 HDP MPs (5 of them women), including their co-chairs Figen Yuksekdag and Selahattin Demirtas. Sebahat Tuncel, co-chair of the DBP, was also arrested. Within a single year 5,389 members of the DBP have been detained, and 2,574 of them remain in prison.

Within the last year the Turkish state has killed hundreds of Kurds, destroyed tens of thousands of houses, displaced millions of people, detained dozens of elected Kurdish mayors, replaced them with trustees, closed down all Kurdish and alternative media in Turkey—from TV stations to newspapers and journals—and arrested their political representatives. Now it is closing down the last remaining places where Kurds organize themselves.

Meanwhile the Turkish army is constantly bombing Kurdish cities in Rojava, killing dozens of civilians and self-defense forces. Afrin Canton is currently under military siege by Turkish soldiers and elements of the so-called Free Syrian Army, who are preparing to create a second Kobane there. Furthermore last night news reached us that Turkish tanks are crossing the border into Iraqi Kurdistan to launch an unlawful offensive against PKK forces there.

The current Turkish government, with support of nationalist and ultranationalist parties and forces, is establishing a fascist dictatorship. What is happening today is not comparable to the military coup of 1980 or the ‘dirty war’ against the Kurds in the 1990s. The fascist regime under the leadership of Erdogan is repeating genocidal history, taking Nazi Germany as its example and reiterating exactly the same policy of Hitler after his seizure of power. This is reality that cannot be whitewashed.

We call on you to support the Kurdish people in their resistance against this fascist regime and show active solidarity. This regime is not only threatening the Kurds and democratic forces in Turkey, but following a very dangerous policy whose effects will not stop at the borders of the Turkish state.

Unite against fascism, for freedom and democracy!
Stop Turkish fascism! Join the resistance!

On November 12, 2016, at 8:30 am, Turkish state security forces surrounded the KJA (Kongreya Jinen Azad, Free Women’s Congress) center in Diyarbakir and at 11:00 am, based on a statutory decree article issued under the State of Emergency rule, Turkey’s Ministry of Interior suspended the KJA activities and sealed and shut down its building.

KJA has been raided four times by the Turkish police forces in the past six months. During the last raid, its member registration book and minute/decision book were seized.

These state assaults on us women will never discourage us! We have been waging the women’s freedom struggle for forty years now. With our democratic, ecological, and women-liberationist paradigm, we the women are strongly present in every sphere of life, in each house, in each village, in each town and city.

We know by heart that when the male-domination mentality brutally attacks the women’s struggle, it is because they are threatened by it. And you, male-dominated AKP mentality—you should indeed be afraid of us! We belong to the women’s struggle tradition of Sakine Cansız (massacred in Paris in 2013), which resisted the fascist military coup of September 12, 1980. You will never manage to confine us to our homes. You cannot suppress our struggle by shutting KJA down!

The seal on the KJA building is a dark seal of shame and disgrace imprinted by AKP and Erdoğan on the political history of Turkey.

As KJA, we will not step back. We are angrier and more organized than yesterday now. It is our promise to our people who have paid enormous prices and to all women that we will continue our resistance with escalating determination and steadfastness!

The civil war in Syria gets worse, with Assad seeing success with his strategy of starving territory back into control, and Turkey crossing the border. Yet again, the establishment media has done little more than regurgitate the official spin: that Turkey is responding to the ISIL terrorist attack on its territory by committing ground troops to the fight against them in Syria. When in fact, the bomb attack was in (Turkey-occupied) Kurdistan, at the wedding of a Kurdish political activist, which was used by Turkey as an excuse to implement a plan it had drawn up not to fight ISIL but to attack the autonomist project of the Syrian Kurds in Rojava, who are the most successful grouping gaining back territory from ISIL. And the US has gone along with it and finally ended the uneasy ‘temporary’ relationship with the Kurds, possibly because they don’t want Turkey getting closer to Russia, possibly because they too see the Rojava autonomist project as a threat, probably both. Either way, it shows that for the US and Turkey alike, fighting terrorism is less of a priority than imperialist hegemony. See this and this articles on the deal.

Puerto Rican street art by La Puerta collective calling for a revolution against US colonialism. Image from ROAR.

Protest by students at a formerly white-only school in Pretoria, South Africa, where a ban on afros is the trigger leading to outburst, but only the latest of a series of policies that has led students to connect the dots of institutional racism. “That is what forces us to realise that no matter how hard we work or how well we speak, we remain black. That is what forces us to realise that we are still niggers. That is what forces ‘coconuts’ to become conscious”. Photo from Daily Maverick.

French-Chinese community in Paris organise and take to the streets to protest against violent, anti-Chinese racist violence following recent murder. Image from Liberation.fr

And finally an excellent intersectionalist analysis queering marxism – looking at the many ways heteronormative society pushes LGBT*Q people into precarity. I usually don’t like overly materialist left-wing analysis because they tend to reduce form of oppression to just the economic impact, but this one does a great job.

Call for solidarity put out by the diplomatic committee of the Youth Union of Rojava. Decries treatment of Ocalan in prison, sets out some of the vision of the Rojava Democratic Confederalist project and calls for international solidarity with the movement. Thanks to Insurrection News for sharing.

“Through international solidarity towards Abdullah Öcalan’s freedom

A call from Yekîtiya Ciwanên Rojava

While the capitalist modernity wants to prolong it’s age by emptying the content of our universe especially the minds of people which have been played with by the hands of oppression, until the point that people’s minds neither recognize what is happening in their environment nor with which danger humanity and life itself are confronted with. Since the creation of city states in Sumer and during their continuing development by oppressive powers until these days, all the people that stood up against the monster of capitalism were confronted with annihilation. In all times, especially in the Middle East, the capitalist system has been violating and destroying the natural laws. Furthermore it didn’t let the people of the region live together a life of peace and stability.

But in between this chaos somebody raised his head and said, enough of annihilation of humanity and nature and enough of violence, and began a struggle for the creation of a new system, a system which is lived in peace by all peoples on the basis of women’s freedom and defense of the nature/ecology. The one who created the idea of this system and the one who stood against the annihilation of societies and the interests of oppressive states, is the philosopher of the people Abdullah Öcalan. But he was kidnapped and detained through the international plot of these states on the 15th of February 1999. This plot targeted the will of freedom of Middle Eastern’s people in the individual of Öcalan. Since then Öcalan has been in the Imrali prison.

But because the people of this region do not follow the dirty games of capitalism, that’s why they have created the system of Democratic Nation for a common and con-federal life. In the system of Democratic Nation there is sociology of freedom and social justice to be found for all humans to be able to live equally in a ethic and political society based on youth’s initiative, ecology and women’s freedom. A result of this democratic idea are the revolution in Rojava and the creation of the federal system of North-Syria. Wherein all components of society are participating and have formed their own self-defense to resist the enemy of humanity – the Islamic State.

But this system, which has been created is not in the interest of the oppressive powers. For this reason a total isolation on Öcalan has been imposed from the 5th of April 2015 on, following the decision of AKP not to continue the peace process and therefore not to find a solution for the peoples of the region. The goal of this process, which has been started by Öcalan, is the creation of a democratic future, not only for the Kurdish and Turkish people but rather for all the people worldwide.

We, as the youth of Rojava which is organizing itself with the paradigm of Öcalan, are calling all the people and democratic forces worldwide, especially the youth, for actions and pressure on their governments so that the meetings with Öcalan are continued and informations about his situation are given concerning his life threat due to the very tense situation in Turkey right now. Not at least because this total isolation is against all kinds of human rights and because it’s an international plot, is it absolutely necessary for all democratic forces to fight for the freedom of Öcalan.

The struggle for freedom for Öcalan means struggle for the freedom of the people!Fighting for freedom of Öcalan means fighting for women’s liberation!Freedom for Öcalan means freedom for the youth and their initiative role in the society!

Anti-coup demonstrators beat captured soliders, most of whom were young conscripts who had no idea what they were taking part in. Shows the masculinist character of what Erdongan described as saviours of democracy, and of the kind of fascist state and auxiliary society he is trying to mould. Image shared from the Guardian.

July was the month of violence and terrorism across germany, france, the usa, and a failed coup and nationalist backlash in Turkey. Although the levels of violence was still far less than in Iraq, Nigeria, or Somalia this month (not to mention Syria) the white media still focussed on dangers in the safest parts of the world. And when they weren’t talking about terrorism they were talking about leadership contests in the anglo-centric centres of the universe, all under the shadow of predictably senseless discussion on Brexit. Among some of the exceptions from within the empires are some interesting pieces on groups trying to tackle post-referendum racism, (see also a piece by the Wretched of the Earth Collective on how to practice anti-racist solidarity, previously linked to on this blog) a discussion thread critically exposing the shamelessness of the anti-democratic elite of the britain’s Labour party, plus some guidelines for how members can try to win back the organisation and turn it into a member-based party (although a structure based on direct democracy and instantly-recallable delegates is still beyond the horizon). And actually, some good points are made in this other post arguing how the time spent by activists reclaiming the Labour party might be better spent on extra-parliamentary organising.